2.132/2.133: Measurement, Instrumentation, Control and Analysis

Fall | Undergraduate and Graduate | 6 Units | Prerequisits: None

This course teaches students skills in designing and building instrumentation. It is a project intensive course in which students use a wide variety of experimental setups called MICA (Measurement, Instrumentation, Controls and Analysis) Workstations to learn about sensors, actuators, instrumentation and measurement techniques. The Workstations are used to perform experiments under the control of Mathematica Notebooks. Data analyses and model fitting and homework assignments are conducted using these Notebooks. The recent integration of ChatGPT into Mathematica provides virtual tutor to help the learning process. There are currently over 50 MICA Workstations available allowing experiments to be performed on a wide variety of phenomena including those found in optics, electronics, acoustics, biology, botany, material science, mechanics, thermal and fluid systems. Every few weeks students choose a Workstation to work with individually. They also design (using CAD modeling) and build a new Workstation and develop the Mathematica code to run experiments and perform data analyses and model parameter estimation.